OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Pretraining Image Encoders without Reconstruction via Feature Prediction Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This work investigates three methods for calculating loss for autoencoder-based pretraining of image encoders: The commonly used reconstruction loss, the more recently introduced deep perceptual similarity loss, and a feature prediction loss proposed here; the latter turning out to be the most efficient choice. Standard auto-encoder pretraining for deep learning tasks is done by comparing the input image and the reconstructed image. Recent work shows that predictions based on embeddings generated by image autoencoders can be improved by training with perceptual loss, i.e., by adding a loss network after the decoding step. So far the autoencoders trained with loss networks implemented an explicit comparison of the original and reconstructed images using the loss network. However, given such a loss network we show that there is no need for the time-consuming task of decoding the entire image. Instead, we propose to decode the features of the loss network, hence the name "feature prediction loss". To evaluate this method we perform experiments on three standard publicly available datasets (LunarLander-v2, STL-10, and SVHN) and compare six different procedures for training image encoders (pixel-wise, perceptual similarity, and feature prediction losses; combined with two variations of image and feature encoding/decoding). The embedding-based prediction results show that encoders trained with feature prediction loss is as good or better than those trained with the other two losses. Additionally, the encoder is significantly faster to train using feature prediction loss in comparison to the other losses. The method implementation used in this work is available online: https://github.com/guspih/Perceptual-Autoencoders
HELFI: a Hebrew-Greek-Finnish Parallel Bible Corpus with Cross-Lingual Morpheme Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Twenty-five years ago, morphologically aligned Hebrew-Finnish and Greek-Finnish bitexts (texts accompanied by a translation) were constructed manually in order to create an analytical concordance (Luoto et al., 1997) for a Finnish Bible translation. The creators of the bitexts recently secured the publisher's permission to release its fine-grained alignment, but the alignment was still dependent on proprietary, third-party resources such as a copyrighted text edition and proprietary morphological analyses of the source texts. In this paper, we describe a nontrivial editorial process starting from the creation of the original one-purpose database and ending with its reconstruction using only freely available text editions and annotations. This process produced an openly available dataset that contains (i) the source texts and their translations, (ii) the morphological analyses, (iii) the cross-lingual morpheme alignments.
SlimConv: Reducing Channel Redundancy in Convolutional Neural Networks by Weights Flipping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The channel redundancy in feature maps of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) results in the large consumption of memories and computational resources. In this work, we design a novel Slim Convolution (SlimConv) module to boost the performance of CNNs by reducing channel redundancies. Our SlimConv consists of three main steps: Reconstruct, Transform and Fuse, through which the features are splitted and reorganized in a more efficient way, such that the learned weights can be compressed effectively. In particular, the core of our model is a weight flipping operation which can largely improve the feature diversities, contributing to the performance crucially. Our SlimConv is a plug-and-play architectural unit which can be used to replace convolutional layers in CNNs directly. We validate the effectiveness of SlimConv by conducting comprehensive experiments on ImageNet, MS COCO2014, Pascal VOC2012 segmentation, and Pascal VOC2007 detection datasets. The experiments show that SlimConv-equipped models can achieve better performances consistently, less consumption of memory and computation resources than non-equipped conterparts. For example, the ResNet-101 fitted with SlimConv achieves 77.84% top-1 classification accuracy with 4.87 GFLOPs and 27.96M parameters on ImageNet, which shows almost 0.5% better performance with about 3 GFLOPs and 38% parameters reduced.
Task-Independent Spiking Central Pattern Generator: A Learning-Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Legged locomotion is a challenging task in the field of robotics but a rather simple one in nature. This motivates the use of biological methodologies as solutions to this problem. Central pattern generators are neural networks that are thought to be responsible for locomotion in humans and some animal species. As for robotics, many attempts were made to reproduce such systems and use them for a similar goal. One interesting design model is based on spiking neural networks. This model is the main focus of this work, as its contribution is not limited to engineering but also applicable to neuroscience. This paper introduces a new general framework for building central pattern generators that are task-independent, biologically plausible, and rely on learning methods. The abilities and properties of the presented approach are not only evaluated in simulation but also in a robotic experiment. The results are very promising as the used robot was able to perform stable walking at different speeds and to change speed within the same gait cycle.
Sandwiches for Promise Constraint Satisfaction
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2020
Year: 2020

Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problems (PCSP) were proposed recently by Brakensiek and Guruswami arXiv:1704.01937 as a framework to study approximations for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). Informally a PCSP asks to distinguish between whether a given instance of a CSP has a solution or not even a specified relaxation can be satisfied. All currently known tractable PCSPs can be reduced in a natural way to tractable CSPs. Barto arXiv:1909.04878 presented an example of a PCSP over Boolean structures for which this reduction requires solving a CSP over an infinite structure. We give a first example of a PCSP over Boolean structures which reduces to a tractable CSP over a structure of size $3$ but not smaller. Further we investigate properties of PCSPs that reduce to systems of linear equations or to CSPs over structures with semilattice or majority polymorphism.
Towards High Performance, Portability, and Productivity: Lightweight Augmented Neural Networks for Performance Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2020
Year: 2020

Writing high-performance code requires significant expertise in the programming language, compiler optimizations, and hardware knowledge. This often leads to poor productivity and portability and is inconvenient for a non-programmer domain-specialist such as a Physicist. More desirable is a high-level language where the domain-specialist simply specifies the workload in terms of high-level operations (e.g., matrix-multiply(A, B)), and the compiler identifies the best implementation fully utilizing the heterogeneous platform. For creating a compiler that supports productivity, portability, and performance simultaneously, it is crucial to predict the performance of various available implementations (variants) of the dominant operations (kernels) contained in the workload on various hardware to decide (a) which variant should be chosen for each kernel in the workload, and (b) on which hardware resource the variant should run. To enable the performance prediction, we propose lightweight augmented neural networks for arbitrary combinations of kernel-variant-hardware. A key innovation is utilizing the mathematical complexity of the kernels as a feature to achieve higher accuracy. These models are compact to reduce training time and fast inference during compile-time and run-time. Using models with less than 75 parameters, and only 250 training data instances, we are able to obtain a low MAPE of 3%, significantly outperforming traditional feed-forward neural networks on 48 kernel-variant-hardware combinations. We further demonstrate that our variant-selection approach can be used in Halide implementations to obtain up to 1.7x speedup over Halide's auto-scheduler.
Real-time Image Smoothing via Iterative Least Squares
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

Edge-preserving image smoothing is a fundamental procedure for many computer vision and graphic applications. There is a tradeoff between the smoothing quality and the processing speed: the high smoothing quality usually requires a high computational cost which leads to the low processing speed. In this paper, we propose a new global optimization based method, named iterative least squares (ILS), for efficient edge-preserving image smoothing. Our approach can produce high-quality results but at a much lower computational cost. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the propose method can produce results with little visible artifacts. Moreover, the computation of ILS can be highly parallel, which can be easily accelerated through either multi-thread computing or the GPU hardware. With the acceleration of a GTX 1080 GPU, it is able to process images of 1080p resolution ($1920\times1080$) at the rate of 20fps for color images and 47fps for gray images. In addition, the ILS is flexible and can be modified to handle more applications that require different smoothing properties. Experimental results of several applications show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/wliusjtu/Real-time-Image-Smoothing-via-Iterative-Least-Squares}
Hide Secret Information in Blocks: Minimum Distortion Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, a new steganographic method is presented that provides minimum distortion in the stego image. The proposed encoding algorithm focuses on DCT rounding error and optimizes that in a way to reduce distortion in the stego image, and the proposed algorithm produces less distortion than existing methods (e.g., F5 algorithm). The proposed method is based on DCT rounding error which helps to lower distortion and higher embedding capacity.
Multi-label natural language processing to identify diagnosis and procedure codes from MIMIC-III inpatient notes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In the United States, 25% or greater than 200 billion dollars of hospital spending accounts for administrative costs that involve services for medical coding and billing. With the increasing number of patient records, manual assignment of the codes performed is overwhelming, time-consuming and error-prone, causing billing errors. Natural language processing can automate the extraction of codes/labels from unstructured clinical notes, which can aid human coders to save time, increase productivity, and verify medical coding errors. Our objective is to identify appropriate diagnosis and procedure codes from clinical notes by performing multi-label classification. We used de-identified data of critical care patients from the MIMIC-III database and subset the data to select the ten (top-10) and fifty (top-50) most common diagnoses and procedures, which covers 47.45% and 74.12% of all admissions respectively. We implemented state-of-the-art Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to fine-tune the language model on 80% of the data and validated on the remaining 20%. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 87.08%, an F1 score of 85.82%, and an AUC of 91.76% for top-10 codes. For the top-50 codes, our model achieved an overall accuracy of 93.76%, an F1 score of 92.24%, and AUC of 91%. When compared to previously published research, our model outperforms in predicting codes from the clinical text. We discuss approaches to generalize the knowledge discovery process of our MIMIC-BERT to other clinical notes. This can help human coders to save time, prevent backlogs, and additional costs due to coding errors.
Foundations of Explainable Knowledge-Enabled Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Explainability has been an important goal since the early days of Artificial Intelligence. Several approaches for producing explanations have been developed. However, many of these approaches were tightly coupled with the capabilities of the artificial intelligence systems at the time. With the proliferation of AI-enabled systems in sometimes critical settings, there is a need for them to be explainable to end-users and decision-makers. We present a historical overview of explainable artificial intelligence systems, with a focus on knowledge-enabled systems, spanning the expert systems, cognitive assistants, semantic applications, and machine learning domains. Additionally, borrowing from the strengths of past approaches and identifying gaps needed to make explanations user- and context-focused, we propose new definitions for explanations and explainable knowledge-enabled systems.
Verification of Neural Networks: Enhancing Scalability through Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Verification of deep neural networks has witnessed a recent surge of interest, fueled by success stories in diverse domains and by abreast concerns about safety and security in envisaged applications. Complexity and sheer size of such networks are challenging for automated formal verification techniques which, on the other hand, could ease the adoption of deep networks in safety- and security-critical contexts. In this paper we focus on enabling state-of-the-art verification tools to deal with neural networks of some practical interest. We propose a new training pipeline based on network pruning with the goal of striking a balance between maintaining accuracy and robustness while making the resulting networks amenable to formal analysis. The results of our experiments with a portfolio of pruning algorithms and verification tools show that our approach is successful for the kind of networks we consider and for some combinations of pruning and verification techniques, thus bringing deep neural networks closer to the reach of formally-grounded methods.
M$^5$L: Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning for RGBT Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Classifying the confusing samples in the course of RGBT tracking is a quite challenging problem, which hasn't got satisfied solution. Existing methods only focus on enlarging the boundary between positive and negative samples, however, the structured information of samples might be harmed, e.g., confusing positive samples are closer to the anchor than normal positive samples.To handle this problem, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning framework, named M$^5$L for RGBT tracking in this paper. In particular, we design a multi-margin structured loss to distinguish the confusing samples which play a most critical role in tracking performance boosting. To alleviate this problem, we additionally enlarge the boundaries between confusing positive samples and normal ones, between confusing negative samples and normal ones with predefined margins, by exploiting the structured information of all samples in each modality.Moreover, a cross-modality constraint is employed to reduce the difference between modalities and push positive samples closer to the anchor than negative ones from two modalities.In addition, to achieve quality-aware RGB and thermal feature fusion, we introduce the modality attentions and learn them using a feature fusion module in our network. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets testify that our framework clearly improves the tracking performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art RGBT trackers.
Pool-Based Unsupervised Active Learning for Regression Using Iterative Representativeness-Diversity Maximization (iRDM)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Active learning (AL) selects the most beneficial unlabeled samples to label, and hence a better machine learning model can be trained from the same number of labeled samples. Most existing active learning for regression (ALR) approaches are supervised, which means the sampling process must use some label information, or an existing regression model. This paper considers completely unsupervised ALR, i.e., how to select the samples to label without knowing any true label information. We propose a novel unsupervised ALR approach, iterative representativeness-diversity maximization (iRDM), to optimally balance the representativeness and the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments on 12 datasets from various domains demonstrated its effectiveness. Our iRDM can be applied to both linear regression and kernel regression, and it even significantly outperforms supervised ALR when the number of labeled samples is small.
Urban Traffic Monitoring and Modeling System: An IoT Solution for Enhancing Road Safety
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Qatar expects more than a million visitors during the 2022 World Cup, which will pose significant challenges. The high number of people will likely cause a rise in road traffic congestion, vehicle crashes, injuries and deaths. To tackle this problem, Naturalistic Driver Behavior can be utilised which will collect and analyze data to estimate the current Qatar traffic system, including traffic data infrastructure, safety planning, and engineering practices and standards. In this paper, an IoT based solution to facilitate such a study in Qatar is proposed. Different data points from a driver are collected and recorded in an unobtrusive manner, such as trip data, GPS coordinates, compass heading, minimum, average, and maximum speed and his driving behavior, including driver's drowsiness level. Analysis of these data points will help in prediction of crashes and road infrastructure improvements to reduce such events. It will also be used for drivers risk assessment and to detect extreme road user behaviors. A framework that will help to visualize and manage this data is also proposed, along with a Deep Learning-based application that detects drowsy driving behavior that netted an 82 percent accuracy.
An Overview and Case Study of the Clinical AI Model Development Life Cycle for Healthcare Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Healthcare is one of the most promising areas for machine learning models to make a positive impact. However, successful adoption of AI-based systems in healthcare depends on engaging and educating stakeholders from diverse backgrounds about the development process of AI models. We present a broadly accessible overview of the development life cycle of clinical AI models that is general enough to be adapted to most machine learning projects, and then give an in-depth case study of the development process of a deep learning based system to detect aortic aneurysms in Computed Tomography (CT) exams. We hope other healthcare institutions and clinical practitioners find the insights we share about the development process useful in informing their own model development efforts and to increase the likelihood of successful deployment and integration of AI in healthcare.
Who Wins the Game of Thrones? How Sentiments Improve the Prediction of Candidate Choice
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This paper analyzes how candidate choice prediction improves by different psychological predictors. To investigate this question, it collected an original survey dataset featuring the popular TV series "Game of Thrones". The respondents answered which character they anticipated to win in the final episode of the series, and explained their choice of the final candidate in free text from which sentiments were extracted. These sentiments were compared to feature sets derived from candidate likeability and candidate personality ratings. In our benchmarking of 10-fold cross-validation in 100 repetitions, all feature sets except the likeability ratings yielded a 10-11% improvement in accuracy on the holdout set over the base model. Treating the class imbalance with synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) increased holdout set performance by 20-34% but surprisingly not testing set performance. Taken together, our study provides a quantified estimation of the additional predictive value of psychological predictors. Likeability ratings were clearly outperformed by the feature sets based on personality, emotional valence, and basic emotions.
Augmented reality as a tool for open science platform by research collaboration in virtual teams
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The provision of open science is defined as a general policy aimed at overcoming the barriers that hinder the implementation of the European Research Area (ERA). An open science foundation seeks to capture all the elements needed for the functioning of ERA: research data, scientific instruments, ICT services (connections, calculations, platforms, and specific studies such as portals). Managing shared resources for the community of scholars maximizes the benefits to society. In the field of digital infrastructure, this has already demonstrated great benefits. It is expected that applying this principle to an open science process will improve management by funding organizations in collaboration with stakeholders through mechanisms such as public consultation. This will increase the perception of joint ownership of the infrastructure. It will also create clear and non-discriminatory access rules, along with a sense of joint ownership that stimulates a higher level of participation, collaboration and social reciprocity. The article deals with the concept of open science. The concept of the European cloud of open science and its structure are presented. According to the study, it has been shown that the structure of the cloud of open science includes an augmented reality as an open-science platform. An example of the practical application of this tool is the general description of MaxWhere, developed by Hungarian scientists, and is a platform of aggregates of individual 3D spaces.
Nonparametric Deconvolution Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We describe nonparametric deconvolution models (NDMs), a family of Bayesian nonparametric models for collections of data in which each observation is the average over the features from heterogeneous particles. For example, these types of data are found in elections, where we observe precinct-level vote tallies (observations) of individual citizens' votes (particles) across each of the candidates or ballot measures (features), where each voter is part of a specific voter cohort or demographic (factor). Like the hierarchical Dirichlet process, NDMs rely on two tiers of Dirichlet processes to explain the data with an unknown number of latent factors; each observation is modeled as a weighted average of these latent factors. Unlike existing models, NDMs recover how factor distributions vary locally for each observation. This uniquely allows NDMs both to deconvolve each observation into its constituent factors, and also to describe how the factor distributions specific to each observation vary across observations and deviate from the corresponding global factors. We present variational inference techniques for this family of models and study its performance on simulated data and voting data from California. We show that including local factors improves estimates of global factors and provides a novel scaffold for exploring data.